Dreams That Don’t Heal
Myth experienced, not explained, in fantasy writing.
Fantasy often tries to earn the reader’s trust by explaining its world. This passage takes the opposite approach. It treats the afterlife, past lives, and cosmology the way dreams treat memory: present, unargued, and uninterested in clarity. Nothing pauses to justify itself. The focus stays on residue — bodily sensation, fractured recall, and emotional pressure — letting myth operate as experience rather than information. What holds the scene together is not lore, but consequence. The world is vast, but it is allowed to happen to the character instead of being shown off to the reader.
What if the afterlife doesn’t explain itself — and doesn’t need to?
The fear does not unfold. It is delivered.
Dreams, Death, and the Refusal to Comfort
John dreamed of a battle-axe shattering his spine. Even in sleep, the place it struck itched.
They stood on a floating island with their grandfather beneath an endless, burning blue sky. Below them was nothing — an infinite blackness that swallowed the eye. Around the island drifted rings of flat, disc-shaped planets: some clustered, some solitary, stretching outward beyond counting.
It had not yet settled into Johan, John in this life, that he was dead. He looked to his grandfather, the Druid Bergenee, seated by a violet fire. Closest among the planets was Earth — one of nine, all the same size, including the shattered world beyond Mars.
Memories came in fragments.
A younger brother, Hunfried Hugo, dead alongside him and their father, Lord Wolfgang Heinrich Bergenee.
A twin sister, Karla Amelia, was killed fighting off the men who raped and burned their forest keep.
A younger sister, Vergonia Maria, was struck by a misplaced arrow.
John had learned to tell his past-life dreams from his nightmares. Whenever one of his family wore an owl’s head, he knew.
That night, he dreamed of the afterlife — of the last time they met before not entering the White Tunnel. His owl-headed mother urged him forward, promising reunion with their ancestors. But his grandfather reminded him that there was still work to do. He must meet the Crow’s granddaughter. He must find the Golden-Eyed Wolf.
Then blue flames descended.
They burned away the tunnel.
They burned away the island.
Falling into the sucking blackness below, John cried out, “Mother!” A green-gloved hand appeared — too far away.
Sometimes it happens.
If this moment stayed with you, the story continues.
Golden Eyed Wolf is the beginning of the Mortal Immortals series.
Read Book One on Amazon